Where Does IT Fall Within Your Organization? 243
ros256 writes "I help out a relatively small (100 employees) medical device company that does not have a dedicated IT department. Instead the network admin reports to a manager in the Clinical department. Although this seems unusual to me, the organization isn't really structured at this point to have IT staff report to a department more relevant to the work they do. I've been giving thought as to where within the organization would make more sense. So, I pose this question to the Slashdot community: Where does IT fall within the organizations you work with?"
Few places... (Score:5, Interesting)
A few places I've worked IT fell under Operations, the same people that keep the lightbulbs changed, the warehouse shipping and the driveway plowed.
Presently I work at a smaller business, where I represent the department. I'm lateral to Operations Director, sales director, etc and report directly to the President and VP.
Not sure how much this will help you specifically (Score:5, Interesting)
I recommend reading The Geek Gap [amazon.com]. It might give you some further insight into the topic (and, if nothing else, it might help your boss and their boss understand the importance of a proper department).
I also would recommend anyone in an IT or management position to read that book. It's a great read that can be finished over a weekend.
operations (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Few places... (Score:1, Interesting)
The boss seemed to think my time in the shed would help familiarise me with fish species. That it did, but they couldn't understand how that knowledge was next to useless to me for the job. They also didn't understand how being the highest paid person in the shed on my first day wouldn't stir things up.
I had a management setup like this once... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was the sole system administrator for a finance software development department in a big company, and reported directly to the manager of the finance team. She wasn't a technical person, and had an home office 1,500 miles away. Amusingly, I NEVER saw her in person for the 18 months that I worked for her.
The good thing about working for her is that she didn't understand what I did, and didn't particularly care to learn. She didn't bother asking questions as to what I was up to, just assumed that I was doing a good job, and gave me great reviews every year. The flip side of that is that she didn't understand why we needed things like new equipment, new software, or training... which left me running the entire development department on 6 year old refurbished equipment that I could "borrow" from other departments.
That said, it was a good time. I thought myself a lot of useful skills during my downtime, which made me a better sysadmin later on. I wish that I had more managers like that now :)
What is an IT department? (Score:1, Interesting)
What IT department? We are a 90% Mac based non-profit (12 million/yr, 100 employees), I am assistant director, and do IT work as a sideline due to personal experience. Everything works, servers, anti virus and backup centrally controlled, all servers and workstations mirrored, back up on and off site via Crashplan, volume licensing covers compliance. Users are pretty much self sufficient on Macs. End of story.
Re:Nowhere (Score:5, Interesting)
When I worked at Freescale, there actually was no real IT department there: it was outsourced to an Indian company. They got paid based on the number of tickets resolved, so they were always trying to make up more work for themselves to do, such as creating tickets to set up IM on an employee's computer, or various other trivial tasks.
Re:Few places... (Score:3, Interesting)
Used to be under Facilities in a company I'm familiar with, but management found that most if not all projects had deep, expensive IT consequences. Elevating IT to the level at which strategy was developed improved planning a lot.
Re:Few places... (Score:5, Interesting)
Most companies view IT as pure overhead and try to micromanage it's budget out of fear of excess spending. I can't blame them. Once upon a time all you paid for was an office and some basic office supplies. Now your yearly software license costs alone rival your rent.
A better motivation would be to stick close to their IT department to make sure both sides understand what the businesses goals and visions are.
"We want to mobilize out sales force"
"We want a stronger web presence"
"We want ensure 24/7 up time even in the case of a disaster"
"We want to make X process and Y process work together more seemlessly using available technology"
Getting lost in small details or second guessing the decisions of the IT people you pay to make IT decisions for you ends up hurting businesses. Like "Hey! Stop buying $100 antivirus software buy $19.99 ones!" If IT has to waste time cleaning viruses and reformating machines then they have no time to plan for future growth or to research solutions to real business problems. It stifles growth and wastes money in other areas.
Re:well... (Score:2, Interesting)
A university where I worked had us under the VP of Administrative services. This included accounts payable, employee management and student-related departments like bursars offices.
I worked at a Fortune 500 providing stock exchange data to banks and trader firms via Unix servers and a Windows .NET front-end. Yet, our division was not separate from Sales, which was amusing. It meant we tried damn hard to keep clients happy and "their" sales reps informed of trouble.
Operations (Score:3, Interesting)
I worked for a non profit company with about 200 people, and there were like 5 divisions, Sales and service, Accounting, Publishing, Marketing, and Operations. IT fell under operations. Operations included things like janitorial services, the guys who managed the HVAC, etc. IT was considered a tool to maintain the business flow, and it actually was a very well thought out department; it seemed to fit just right. I was brought in to assist with the first attempt at a "rolling update" of all the machines in the building from old Win 3.1 boxes to Windows NT, and while I was there we started implementing the first help desk to manage the questions coming in from the new hardware. It was a well oiled machine, and we understood we were exactly that, people who knew our IT infrastructure was simply a machine that needed to be oiled and maintained regularly. You may turn your nose up to the idea that IT belongs under someone who manages the guys who make sure the Air Conditioning works, but in fact that's what we did, and what a lot of IT departments do, or should do.
IT had three teams, desktop, network, and development. Each was headed by a different manager. A previous post mentioned how IT often cannabalized development, but IT managed development can work fine as long as it's separate from the rest of the IT team and dedicated to it's task. Also the company has to be sufficiently large enough to warrant it. This was a nonprofit publishing company. For your medical device company it depends on what they use IT for. If you basically buy and sell, if you need a development team to manage your sales tools, then they can be in IT and be responsible for these types of programs, but make sure they also are accessible to the people who need them. IT can easily get Aloof and think they don't have to help people who don't do things exactly the way they want, and thus can't get work done.
Re: Where Does IT Fall Within Your Organization? (Score:3, Interesting)
I found it easier and more cost effective to mirror everything across machines. Redundant power supplies and disks don't help much if say the motherboard goes bad, or a kernel panic brings a machine to a screeching stop.
At the time, we were building commodity servers (Asus motherboard, not quite bleeding edge CPU, IDE drives, in a 1u case) for about $500. Over time, we shifted away from those to 1u Supermicro machines (just add CPU, memory, and SATA drives in hotswap carriers) for about $1500. Instances of arbitrary crashing were still minimal, but the cases were prettier, and it saved us some installation headaches. Those headaches came where CPU's were running a bit warmer and we were having a hard time cooling them. The Supermicro chassis/motherboard combo took care of that for us.
There were still people saying "why don't you buy [high dollar vendor]", and I'd always justify it as for $10,000, you get one server. For $9,000, I get 6 machines that can handle almost as much load per machine. As far as load goes, for my 6 machines, I'd need 3 of your [high dollar vendor] machines. Load for load, versus dollar cost, for $10,000 and no redundancy, I'd only spend $3,000.
When upgrade day comes, and it will always come for a company who stays in business long enough, its easier to say "We're retiring these machines now.", when the cost wasn't very high. In reality, we rarely retired machines unless they had a serious failure. They just worked their way down the priority list until we had better machines to do the lowest priority tasks. It was usually something like high end web server -> low end web server -> special purpose low use server (dns, internal monitoring, internal development, etc). We always had room to have extra low load redundant web servers for the high traffic sites.
We had a Dell, specifically configured for an application. The guy running that project did a hard sell to get us to use it. He got the boss to buy it for $40,000. (big, ugly, heavy, and all bleeding edge). I wasn't given a choice. After a few years and one critical error, I *HAD* to redo the OS on it. I moved all of its responsibilities off to a machine that we spent $1,000 on. I just had it up as a hot spare for another application. Then I got the phone call. "Wow! You're already done fixing my machine? It's flying now!" I had to break the news to him, it's running on one of my $1k spares. Suddenly I had a $40,000 boat anchor on my hands. He didn't want to go back to the old machine.
The Dell was a quad 500Mhz with 8Gb RAM, 7 SCSI drives, 4 RAID controllers, in a 6u case that took two people to move. The machine we had moved him to was a 1u dual 1.4Ghz with 4Gb RAM with 2 IDE drives mirrored. (as I remember it, I could be slightly off). We upgraded him a year or two later to something faster, even though he didn't really need it, and I recycled the previous 1u to a lower priority task.
The Dell sat around the office for a while, and we couldn't figure out what to do with it. I nominated it to be a boat anchor. Last time I saw it, it was sitting on it's edge beside a desk, and papers were stacked on it. A $40,000 end table.
No, IT Ops vs. IT Solutions (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with all this is that IT Operations (first group) are filled with folks who are seen and treated as a cost, thus the organization and people tend to be maintenance oriented and risk-averse (they don't get rewarded for "new thinking"). The 2nd group tends to be so focused on software that only few capable individuals know enough about systems to be able to even speak IT Ops-speak.
The ultimate issue is that it's VERY difficult to find someone who can do all of what it takes to encompass the facilities and innovation aspects of these two teams, so they're split up into two groups, and that split is reinforced by social dynamics.
Re: Where Does IT Fall Within Your Organization? (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, I know all about the intermittent failures. I worked in a computer store for a couple years, and customers would bring in PC's that would crash "sometimes". One guy brought in his machine once a week, with different non-existent problems. I was particularly happy when the boss got involved one of the times. His complaint was that the flight simulator he was playing would bank left for no reason. "I was a pilot, I know how to fly a plane, and this isn't right!". Good, I was a pilot too. I love flight simulators, and the boss told me "keep using it until you can find the problem, and then fix it.". I played it for 8 hours straight. Even when I took bathroom breaks or went to lunch, I'd trim out for straight and level, and when I came back, it was still flying strong. In the end, I had to explain to him how to work the trim on the joystick. :)
We had plenty of "economy" PC's that we sold, that just had weird intermittent problems. Stun guns are great for RMAing those. It changes the problem from "intermittent failure" to "doesn't turn on". :)
I know some intermittent problems are a bastard to work through though. I had a machine once that would get hung up about once every two weeks. The fix for that one was to have a cron to reboot it at 5am Monday morning. It was ugly, but it got us around the hardware problem until I could justify upgrading it. The reboot process took just long enough to trigger our paging system, so I'd get a down page, and then a minute later an up page. That was my Monday morning wakeup call.
We tried to fix everything ourselves, and avoided returning things. For the most part, machines (chassis, motherboard, and CPU) lasted the usable life of the machine. By the time they'd go wonky, they were too old to bother fix. :) CPU fans (as applicable), additional cooling, and hard drives were our biggest problems. We once got a bad set of memory, which shifted us from buying it from a reputable wholesaler, to buying directly from Crucial. I've never had a fault with Crucial memory. We'd RMA drives in lots. Once we had 15 to 20, they'd all get sent back, and then a week or so later it was like Christmas. :)
OS problems were pretty obvious to us. We had a baseline install that was cloned to every machine in that series. Literally I'd install and configure the OS, and tune it up for our needs. I'd then clean it up for size and then tar up the entire thing. We had install CD's which had an install script. The script would format the OS drive, and then untar the previously created tar onto the blank drive. We never had surprises like "did this get installed?"
We didn't necessarily upgrade the OS every time there was an new one, but we kept them patched in sync with each other. We had up to 3 different versions of the same distro floating around at the same time, but it was versioned for our build number also. If it's an OS problem, it's going to show up in an awful lot of machines. Since I tested any new build extensively in house, and then as a one-off in production as part of a cluster, it was well tested before it ever got fully deployed to production.
On the flaky HP, I changed the power supply, hard drives, and memory with known good ones. It still had the problem which left us with the motherboard being bad, or demons in the case. :) By the time we got sufficiently annoyed with it, it was too old and slow to bother with.